Discussion questions for Friday, September 30
After reading the questions below and deciding which one(s) you want to respond to (you're expected to respond once every three classes, on average), click on the appropriate thread to write your response as a reply. If you have not yet registered an account with wikispaces and requested to join this site, you will need to do so to post a response (see the How to Wiki page for instructions).
According to Richard Dyer's classic 1977 essay, "Entertainment and Utopia," musical comedy represents a type of expressive form dedicated, above all, to being entertainment. And what makes entertainment entertaining, Dyer maintains, is the way it tantalizes audiences with an "image of 'something better' to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don't provide." In a word, entertainment is about utopia: not in the sense that such entertainments are essays arguing for a model of how to achieve the best of all possible worlds, but in the sense of demonstrating, through sound, movement, rhythm, and color, what such a world "would feel like" (20). How far would you say that How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying confirms (or complicates) this thesis? What elements or moments of this play reveal (or confound) the "utopian sensibility" that Dyer sees expressed in musical comedy's typical emphasis on the qualities of energy, abundance, intensity, transparency, and community? Choose two or three qualities to discuss, and be specific about how you think sound, movement, etc. in How to Succeed contributes to them.
Richard Dyer argues that entertainment is not simply a distraction from problems of modern life. Rather, the "utopian sensibility" of entertainment responds to real needs and promises alternatives to real problems that modern audiences experience acutely in their everyday lives: isolation, fragmentation, manipulation, monotony, scarcity, the exhaustion of the daily grind. But he also argues that entertainment only faces some of the problems in its audience's lives -- namely, those "that capitalism itself promises to meet" (26; think of the kind of problems that are presented and then solved in TV commercials) -- while leaving larger, structural problems out of the picture (writing in 1977, he mentions the examples of race, class, and gender). How true would you say this is of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying in relation to the early-1960s world from which it comes? What problems of modern life does it take on through "color, texture, movement, rhythm, melody" (20)? And what problems won't it touch with a 10-foot pole? And as a movie about big business, does it end up being a critic of the American economic system of the 1960s? A cheerleader for it? Both?
After reading the questions below and deciding which one(s) you want to respond to (you're expected to respond once every three classes, on average), click on the appropriate thread to write your response as a reply. If you have not yet registered an account with wikispaces and requested to join this site, you will need to do so to post a response (see the How to Wiki page for instructions).